kaloyan.raev

    4 Posts

    My sixth sense of a developer at SAP Labs has giving me a hint that SAP customers are not doomed to use only SAP software. If someone uses SAP products, then it is natural to expect that she has looked at other vendors and has considered taking their best bits of software. And at the end when putting all these pieces together, the expectations are that they talk to each other.

    This assumption of mine has been recently confirmed by a customer who has chosen SAP NetWeaver CE as a development platform, but also has plenty of licenses for IBM Rational Software Architect. And, rationally, the customer find it very useful to utilize his IBM Rational tools for development on top of the SAP NetWeaver CE.

    Failing to install IBM RSA on top of SAP NWDS, due to the different Eclipse versions they are based on, the customer found the SAP NetWeaver Server Adapter for Eclipse to be the solution for his wish. Being a tiny plug-in that integrates the SAP NetWeaver Application Server Java into any Eclipse-based IDE, the server adapter is the crux to bring not only IBM Rational tools to the SAP NetWeaver platform, but any third-party vendor products based on Eclipse. 

    So, if you have already spent some money on IBM Rational software, just give it a try together with the SAP NetWeaver platform.

    The SAP NetWeaver Server Adapter for Eclipse is now open source under the Eclipse Public License. The new home for the project is SourceForge.

    The project SAP NetWeaver Server Adapter for Eclipse almost a year ago to provide integration of the SAP NetWeaver Application Server Java with IDEs other than NWDS. This helps developers to use greater variety of tools when engineering for the SAP NetWeaver platform.

    Until now the server adapter has been distributed under a “90-days trial” license. This implied some limitation on the usage of the server adapter by SAP customers. Now, switching to the Eclipse Public License, any legal barriers for productive usage of the server adapter are eliminated. You can now use the server adapter without any limitation and distribute it in products your company is building. The only limitations are the ones imposed by the Eclipse Public License. For more details on the license, you can take a look at the EPL FAQ provided by the Eclipse Foundation.

    It is worth mentioning that the server adapter is still an experimental project of SAP. It is not an official product of SAP and there is no official support guaranteed. You cannot get support through OSS tickets. This does not mean that there isn’t any support at all. Like other open source projects, the server adapter has a bug tracking system that is followed by the project team, which will do its best to resolve your issues. And, like in other open source projects, you are welcome to not only submit bugs, but also to provide patches, help with the documentation wiki and talk about the project.

    The SourceForge platform provides plentiful new tools for the project. There is not only the public source code repository and wiki, but also a bug tracking system, mirrored file distribution system, etc. Having this new infrastructure in place, you should know that the update site of the project is moved to a new URL address. You can check the installation instructions for details.

    The project’s wiki is currently being populated with instruction how to use the server adapter and how to participate in the project development. Soon we will have also a public build infrastructure, which will make the development environment easier for developers outside SAP.

    We all believe that this change will give you, the SAP customers and partners, better options for utilizing the SAP NetWeaver platform in your solutions. Your feedback is welcome on the new project home at: http://sourceforge.net/projects/sapnweclipse/.

    I am happy to announce the first (known) customer success story of the SAP NetWeaver Server Adapter for Eclipse.

    The Sysco Corporation has a project that needs to build applications on Adobe Flex 4 and still deploy them from the IDE to their SAP NetWeaver CE 7.1 EHP1 application server. The Adobe Flash Builder 4 is a set of Eclipse plug-ins that require Eclipse 3.4+ to install. Unfortunately, the SAP NetWeaver Developer Studio 7.1 EHP1 ships with Eclipse 3.3 and this prevent the installation of the Flash Builder plug-ins on top of it.

    Luckily, Sysco founds the SAP NetWeaver Server Adapter for Eclipse and now successfully run Eclipse 3.5 + Flash Builder 4 and deploy on the SAP NetWeaver 7.1 EHP1 server. They also provided valuable feedback that led to the improvement of the server adapter's deployment mechanism.

    Here is what John Toman says about the Sysco story:

    Our company is currently involved in the conversion to SAP and we have adopted Adobe Flex 4.0 for building out the user interface components for our customers and suppliers.  We’re using NetWeaver CE 7.1.1 application server and the corresponding version of NWDS, but it does not support Flex 4 (requires Eclipse 3.4 or newer).  Additionally, SAP NWDI currently does not support the Flex components (MXML, Action Script).  These constraints forced us to turn to base Eclipse (3.5) for the Flex integration into the IDE.  As we started configuring the IDE we discovered the SAP Server adapter for Eclipse was not able to deploy applications to a remote server.  I contacted the development team responsible for the server adapter and within one day they had provided a solution.  Shortly after we discovered an issue with deploying large applications.  Again, the SAP Labs development team went to work and within days had developed, tested and released a solution.  We’ve had several minor issues since and the SAP team has consistently responded to our requests in an extremely timely manner, with high quality results, every time.  We would not have been able to meet our project goals and objectives without the turnaround SAP Labs provided.  It is refreshing to find a vendor that provides the kind of results as SAP Labs.

    More information about the server adapter and its current state can be found on the wiki page.

    Have you ever wanted developing Java EE applications for the SAP NetWeaver platform using just an ordinary Eclipse IDE? Until now you were bound to the SAP NetWeaver Developer Studio - even when developing standard applications. This dependency is now broken with the introduction of the SAP NetWeaver Server Adapter for Eclipse.

    The SAP NetWeaver Server Adapter for Eclipse is a tiny set of Eclipse plug-ins that integrates the SAP NetWeaver Application Server into the development tools provided by the Eclipse WTP project. All standard features for Java EE development provided by Eclipse WTP are now available for SAP NetWeaver without the need of any other SAP proprietary tools.

    The currently supported releases of the SAP NetWeaver platform are:

    • SAP NetWeaver CE/PI 7.1
    • EHP1 for SAP NetWeaver CE/PI 7.1
    • SAP NetWeaver CE 7.2
    The server adapter is installable on all latest releases of Eclipse, including:
    • Eclipse Europa
    • Eclipse Ganymede
    • Eclipse Galileo
    It is planned that future releases of SAP NetWeaver and Eclipse will be supported, too.

    The SAP NetWeaver Server Adapter for Eclipse is currently under active development. Although it already has a good set of features introduced and wide supportability martix, there is more useful features to come soon from our backlog. Your feedback certainly matters and you can see your influence on the project soon - we release new version at least every month!

    You may try the server adapter right now in your favourite Eclipse installation, or in a fresh new Eclipse IDE for Java EE Developers, by following the easy installation steps. More details on the project's scope are available on the wiki page. 

    Enjoy the Java EE development for the SAP NetWeaver platform in an open environment!